Top Gear's electric car shows pour petrol over the BBC's standards. ⇒
6 August 2011, mid-morning
They basically faked a whole show around how electric cars are shitty.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
Personally, I’m inclined to side with the top gear producer. After watching the show and reading articles from both sides, I don’t think top gear did anything particularly bad.
The way I see it the point that they were trying to make isn’t that electric cars themselves are bad (actually it seemed like clarkson kind of liked the Leaf as a car) – rather that the infrastructure to support an electric car for long journeys is pretty crap. (And to show that on film, of course they’d have to run the cars down ahead of time). Which is true almost everywhere.
If they framed the film as just a commuting trip instead of a long journey between cities that would have been something else.
I think the better/clearer conclusion top gear should of made is that electric cars suck for long journeys, but are probably just fine for normal commuter journey distances (which seems to be a pretty standard consensus). That they emphasized mainly the former and didn’t strongly focus on the latter (which affects more people admittedly) is where the controversy stems from.
by pirijan on August 6 2011, 12:59 pm #